Eric HoracekJun 14, 2023
My last day at Airbnb was just a few weeks ago. While I'm super proud of everything we built together, I wanted to briefly highlight the last project I led: enabling new UI in Airbnb’s iOS app to be built using #SwiftUI
Show threadEric Horacek

We started by adding support to host SwiftUI views in Epoxy, our previous UI framework, to ensure SwiftUI could handle Airbnb’s custom UI needs. When that worked out well, we decided to rebuild our entire design system in SwiftUI to unlock its benefits for full screens.

SwiftUI not only made the implementation of Airbnb’s design system many times smaller due to its declarative paradigm—it made it dramatically more flexible thanks to its styling patterns and support for generic views with slots.

Jun 14, 2023 at 1:26amWeb
Show threadEric HoracekJun 14, 2023

Now, almost all of Airbnb’s new screens and components in our latest launch were built using SwiftUI, and the vast majority of engineers said that SwiftUI made them more efficient without regressing the user-facing quality of their screens.

There will be a blog post published soon with many more details, but suffice to say that SwiftUI is definitely ready for broad adoption, and if adopted intentionally can improve the experience of building even the largest scale iOS apps!

Show threadEric HoracekSep 21, 2023
Took a while but the blog post on SwiftUI at Airbnb is now live! Check it out for more details on how we evaluated SwiftUI and subsequently built a large-scale design system in it https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/unlocking-swiftui-at-airbnb-ea58f50cde49
Show threadEli PerkinsSep 21, 2023

@erichoracek Awesome read! Thanks for sharing. Already shared the post with my team here. 🙇‍♂️

Out of curiosity, how many folks is the Airbnb iOS team these days?

Show threadEric HoracekSep 21, 2023
@eliperkins I’m not there anymore, but it was around 75 regular iOS contributors before I left
Show threadEli PerkinsSep 21, 2023
@erichoracek I didn't realize you left! Your new gig sounds pretty fun 🤩
Show threadJon DuenasJun 14, 2023
@erichoracek Interested in the blog post! Always keen to see how large apps are using SwiftUI at scale.
Show threadRicky WitherspoonJun 14, 2023
@erichoracek we also use #swiftUI at Fetch to ship to millions of users and absolutely love it! +1 for nothing you said.
Show threadOndrej SevcikJun 14, 2023

@erichoracek more efficient compared to what? Did you use Objective-C, react native or something else?

🙏🏽

Show threadEric HoracekJun 14, 2023
@ondrejsevcik we previously built our screens using Epoxy, which is a thin declarative layer over UIKit where components are written as UIView subclasses https://github.com/airbnb/epoxy-ios
GitHub - airbnb/epoxy-ios: Epoxy is a suite of declarative UI APIs for building UIKit applications in Swift

Epoxy is a suite of declarative UI APIs for building UIKit applications in Swift - GitHub - airbnb/epoxy-ios: Epoxy is a suite of declarative UI APIs for building UIKit applications in Swift

GitHub
Show threadChris EidhofJun 14, 2023
@erichoracek very interesting! What's next for you after Airbnb?
Show threadEric HoracekJun 15, 2023
@chris just started at OpenAI! I’ll be working on the ChatGPT app with some other awesome folks
Show threadChris EidhofJun 15, 2023
@erichoracek awesome, that sounds really amazing.
Show threadPakk' Jun 14, 2023
@erichoracek interesting! Is UIKit still used for navigation?
Show threadEric HoracekJun 15, 2023
@pakkito yep! SwiftUI is just used for for screen content—not screen to screen navigation or screen containers, that’s all still UIKit. We did experiment with SwiftUI wrappers for UIKit navigation but felt that was a lot of layers of indirection
Show threadPakk' Jun 15, 2023
@erichoracek thanks for the insights :)